(urth) Silk Takes A Stab At The 'Problem Of Evil'

[Lane Haygood]

> Ok, Lane, right, so Silk's conception of God (the Outsider) is not
> 'occasionalist' (i.e. God *directly* causes all things), but the fact that
> God 'permits' evil and forces it to serve his purposes 'however unwillingly'
> seems to fit in with Aquinas' scheme of primary and secondary causation.
>  Evil is personified by Silk as *hating* God, yet it is 'harnessed' by God
> so that it 'serves' him by pointing us who get hurt by evil back to God for
> our true love and goodness and purpose.

I would say rather that God, as the first cause of all things, is the
cause of evil as well as good, and while men are good at identifying
little-e evil (the bad things that happen) we are not always good at
identifying big-E Evil (the form of Evil, from which all little-e
evils are instances), but regardless, all evil/Evil is ultimately part
of God's plan.  This sounds a lot like the unknown purposes theodicy,
with bits of the soul-making thrown around.  It's a fairly standard
type of theodicy:  bad stuff happens but God is God and has some
reason for it all.

> I think I agree with you that he's arguing that the Outsider allows his
> creation to 'flow organically', but I just want to point out that Silk is
> still conceiving of a God very much 'in control' in that his 'permissive
> will' is orchestrating (if you like) all things towards his desired ends
> (which, though many are unknown as you point out, yet Silk takes a major
> known end to be that of love between creature and Creator).


Sure. I didn't mean to make Silk out to be a deist.  For Silk's God
(and presumably, Wolfe's) desire and control are the same thing;
remember, for the problem of evil to have any gravity at all God must
be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good.  Thus, what God
desires, is, and God would not, as perfectly good, desire that which
he could not do.

The problem of evil is an interesting logical exercise, but I have
never been ultimately convinced of its efficacy (even as a
non-believer).  It, like the ontological argument, comes laden with
value presuppositions that are rarely made explicit, and it is filled
with nonsensical logical wrangling such as whether God needs to be
able to do the impossible (create a round square, for example) to be
perfectly powerful.  I have an Orthodox friend who swears up and down
that perfect power need only encompass God's actions within the sphere
of what is possible (e.g., it is not a hit against God's perfect
potency to say that God cannot make a round square, because
omnipotence is limited to the set of all possible actions), but a
Protestant acquaintance that thinks that God can do the impossible
because no limits of human logic apply to God.  To make matters worse,
I have yet to (myself) come up with a satisfactory definition of evil
that is not question-begging or reduced to some sort of naturalist
handwaving that "it's evil because it is evil."  Certainly I can point
to actions that I think are evil (child abuse, for example) but I
wonder if I am focusing on the end result without any reference to the
motivation or mindset.  What about a parent that spanks their child
too hard?  The parent's motive is discipline, not injury, which ought
to make a difference, even though the end result is the same.
> Dan'l, I vaguely recall that too.  It'd be good if we cold find the exact
> quote.  I want to qualify that thought with the notion that those freewill
> creatures are still somehow genuinely significant in their choices, that our
> part in 'what is going to happen anyway' (or 'consenting to be governed by a
> King' as David Stockhoff said) really 'makes a difference' somehow.
>  However, I'm not sure whether that's Silk's or Wolfe's view.  Wolfe has
> kept me guessing on this.  Sometimes he sounds pretty hard determinist
> (especially, as I seem to recall, in certain passages of tBotNS).  Yet the
> dramas he plays out sound more libertarian.  I know a compatibilist would
> say that's just how things look but it's all causally determined even if our
> 'choices' are 'real' based on our desires (which are determined by all that
> comes before us).  Is there any room for any kind of libertarian freewill in
> Wolfe?

The problem of free will is another tough nut because it comes laden
with lots of often-unanalyzed presuppositions, such as whether God's
foreknowledge entails determination of the result.  The same
aforementioned friends have divergent views, with one taking the
position that God does not need to know everything in order to be
omniscient, if, for example, the thing to be known (the result of a
coin flip) is a matter of probability rather than certainty.  Just
because, for example, I do not know the result of a coin toss you
wouldn't say that I am unknowledgable about coin tosses, the physics
involved, or probability calculations.  Even if I told you that given
my hand strength, the weight of the coin, and atmospheric conditions
the likelihood was greater that I would toss a heads, and I tossed a
tails, you would simply say, "well, he knew the probabilities."  The
other friend, predictably, takes the view that if God knows a thing,
because God is atemporal and perceives all events in time
simultaneously, God has perfect recollective knowledge of the result
of that coin toss.  Friend 1 often rejoins that this just makes God
the perfect historian rather than an intellective being capable of
free thought on his own.

For my own part, being that time is an integral part of my cognition
of the world around me, I cannot imagine what an atemporal being would
think... and yet my own views on philosophy say that a transcendent
being such as God must be unlimited in both space and time, and would
not be saddled with the same cognitive requirements for
intelligibility that I, a limited creature, am.   But because each
friend takes different presuppositions as his starting point (one a
very continental, Hegelian view of the world, and the other a much
more classic Protestant view) they arrive at different answers to
these questions.  So to answer whether we might freely desire a result
set in stone and that be "enough" for free will supposes that "will"
equates to our desires, which is itself a loaded proposition:  might
we not act contrary to our desires, or at some last moment before we
take a volitional action, do we always desire to engage in that
action?

For my own part, I do not think that the problem of freedom of the
will can be answered; how could we ever possibly determine whether our
own actions were free or determined, let alone those of others whose
psychology is closed to us.  We are constrained to act as if our
choices are our own, regardless of whether we are autonomous or merely
the pawns of divinity.

LH